Monday, December 28, 2009

Charming. Prince Charming.

How does one call for a hero? What is the heroic equivalent of an employment agency in the current world?

Testy pondered the question. In the days of kings and quests, one presumed the ruler of the moment just put the word out, and heroes flocked to serve him, lined up in front of his throne. But what was one to do, when one was a piebald, roly-poly drag queen?

“Bet he’d turn up if it were Rachel freezing her ass off up here,” Testy grumbled.

“Que?” the waitress asked as she slopped more coffee-flavored swill in Testy’s cup.

“Never mind. But I bet he’d show up if it was you tied to the railroad tracks and screaming for help. Or even just lost in the wilderness.”

The waitress smiled in confusion and waited.

Testy waved her away. “No, no, I’m not going to order anything else. Thanks, doll. Don’t mind me, I’m just a crazy old leftover.”

Another smile, and a burst of Spanish as the girl walked away.

“Gracias and da nada, doll,” the drag queen sighed. “Now, if I could just get Rachel threatened by an evil mastermind, I bet we’d have our hero here in no time. Wonder what Donald and Rudy are doing?” Although, come to think of it, there were plenty of dire threats around Manhattan that didn’t even require the services of a megalomaniac. Maybe, once her nubile sidekick got home from the West Coast, all Testy would have to do was abandon her in any unfamiliar neighborhood, and she’d be hero-fodder in an instant.

“Or…” Testy drawled, staring into her coffee. Her showgirl sidekick was at that moment in the air somewhere mid-flight. She was zinging, winging between SFO and JFK, having spent the last week getting warm and visiting her parents out West in Sacramento. She'd complained so hard and long about the cold in New York that Testy had practically shoved her onto the gangway in the first week of December.

Now, she was coming back East, apparently fortified with enough sunlight and orange juice to survive the New Year. Or so worn out enough by her mother's comments about missing husbands and unforeseen grandchildren that even Manhattan in the slush of winter would seem like a respite.

She landed tonight, sometime late. Testy pondered. Rachel was a little long in the tooth for the classic damsel in distress, Testy thought to herself. But that had never mattered too much in Las Vegas.

She checked her watch and tried to remember exactly what time Rachel's flight was due to land.

NEXT POST: WHAT THE SEER SEES (Friday 1/1)

Friday, December 25, 2009

A Dark and Stormy Vegas Night

It was a dark and stormy night, both of which were unheard of in Las Vegas.

“Where is she?” Zem demanded, staring out the floor to ceiling windows of the Zeus suite at the Olympus. They hung thirty floors over the Strip and commanded views in both directions. Through the raindrops, sheeting like a private fountain down the glass, red and white lights from cars streamed by, and neon glowed in all directions.

“I don’t know,” Magnolia told him. “I’ve had people out looking.” She shrugged. “She’s a goddess, for god’s sake. She’s supernatural. I’m sure she’s got a million places she can hide that we can’t see. Maybe she went back home, to Greece.”

“Greece isn’t her home,” Zem snapped. “She never belonged there. Find her.”

His high priestess stood three paces back from him and placed her fists on her hips. “How should I do that? Why don’t you go looking? You’d have much better odds than I do. She’s a goddess, Zem. She’s one of your kind.”

“She’s no part of me,” he growled, and he turned and glared. There was lightning in his eyes, this time. Magnolia held herself still, refusing to step back, but it took an effort. Those black eyes, lit from within, were, perhaps, the single scariest thing she’d ever faced. Even her mother could have learned something from that look.

“I’m out of options,” she said, spreading her hands. When cornered by Zem, she’d learned to hit him with practicalities, with nuts and bolts of a human sort. He had no answer to them.

“I need a hero,” he grumbled.

“Ha!” Magnolia hooted. “Agreed. Know any?”

Zem muttered to himself, turning back to the window. “There must be someone, even in this place...”

“What?”

“Never mind,” he snarled. “Go back to your organizing. I’ll do something.”

“Good,” Magnolia said, and dusted thoughts of Venus lightly from her hands. “I don’t know why you’re worried, anyway. It’s not as if–”

Why should I worry?” he demanded.

That time, she did step back. And then, when he turned back to the windows, she melted away, back to where her three top aides, with clipboards and anxious expressions in place, waited.

Magnolia wasn’t accustomed to melting. But she knew when an exit was called for. She glanced back, over her shoulder, and then stepped busily up to the aides.

“Let’s go downstairs, all right?” she suggested. They followed her gratefully, three ugly ducklings with no hope of swanhood, trailing after their spectacular mother.

Zem stared at the passing cars. “There must be some fool in town who thinks he’s brave,” he muttered.

NEXT POST: HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO (Monday 12/28)

Monday, December 21, 2009

Here Be Monsters (maybe)

In the far Northern reaches of Manhattan, up where the streets are numbered well into the two-hundreds; where the island narrows around Broadway till there is no land and only the street remains, one tiny thread crossing the Broadway Bridge from which hangs the whole bulbous Christmas ornament of the island; up where blocky post-war apartment buildings brood; and just where the subway bursts from its banishment below ground to sail like a galleon in victory over to the Bronx, there stands an Arch.

It might be a miniature Arc de Triomphe if the residents of way Upper Manhattan had ever been Francophiles. It might be a gateway from some grand palace outside Moscow, moved to New York by a robber baron rich in Vodka. It might be a power relay station or an auxiliary outpost for subway machinery built by a crazed designer addicted to neo-classicism when the city had some spare money to throw away.

Who knew what it really was, or had been? It was one of those odd, old pieces of forgotten architecture New York is full of, crowding up against the newer, more efficient structures, and as eager to be remembered and fawned over as an opera diva past her prime.

What the Arch on Upper Broadway became, though, was more definite. In the last half of the Twentieth Century it variously served as: a landmark; a sometime billboard; a pedestal for a city garden more hopeful than burgeoning; an extra storage area for three businesses built in front of it, and, once, long before Rachel knew her or took her first step onto any stage, it was Testy Lesbiana’s home.

Testy had moved in on a whim, both hers and the owners. The Arch then formed the back two rooms of an auto body shop where she came looking for a used motorcycle. The owner, Lenny, turned out to need a bookkeeper, and they struck a deal. Testy kept the shops books clean and well-trained, and he built her a Harley-Davidson out of the bits and pieces that passed through his hands. The cot was an added extra, and every few days he would lumber back to it in the Arch’s left leg and drop a carburetor or a gas tank or a pedal, grunt, and leave again. Testy would open one eye, stare at the newest puzzle piece in all its grimy glory, and go back to sleep, unless the sun was high enough to fight its way in through the exhaust fumes and wave to her.

The whole process took over a year, and Testy used her hours and hours of free time, every day, to roam the city and haunt the streets. She learned New York, and she uncovered mysteries there.

New York had no recognizable, assertive identity as cities like London and Paris did, she thought. It had no intrinsic spirit like New Orleans. It was a mishmash, not really a melting pot, but more of a human junk drawer. And proud of itself for that. For someone like Testy Lesbiana, who thought consistency was not just the hobgoblin of little minds but the downfall of whole civilizations—Rome, she claimed, really fell from boredom, because what was left to do there?—New York was endlessly entertaining. The city was a candy store, and she was a sticky-fingered six year old.

She spent her days collecting oddities for her own mental menagerie. She met strangers, and then she met even stranger-ers. She sought out whatever was odd or outstanding in the city, whether living and breathing or stone and mortar. Or sometimes both.

The Arch was her starting point. It was only the first example, the first hint of another, hidden city below the veneer. Someone dreamed and schemed to build this, she thought one day as she glanced up from her books. This was someone’s great ambition. She stared out the door and up at a bit of the overdone dome, with all its bas-relief and crumbling plaster floridness. Someone had envisioned this baroque bit of concrete, and then either their abilities faltered and this was as far as their dream got, or else she hadn’t yet stumbled on its other outgrowths.

She decided to go out looking. If the Arch were here, hulking in the middle of Broadway, hunkered with no explanations in the middle of Washington Heights, then there must more fabulous and romantic leftovers lurking just underneath common perception. She put down her pencil and went out to look. And she was right, and they were everywhere.

She found herself, in short order, unearthing a Manhattan made up of another mishmash altogether. It was, to some extent, the metaphorical Manhattan everybody imagined, the real source of the city’s fame. But it was much more subtle, much stranger, and much more filled with weirdness than the legends had let on.

This Manhattan was made up of lost, forgotten dreams from generations disappeared. It had a different skyline than the island’s well-known bed-of-nails profile. It had a different sky. It was peopled by characters barely real, and sometimes blatantly fictitious. They walked among the normal hustle-bustle without ever being noticed, because that was what the physical Manhattan prided itself on.

And Testy got to know it, and its denizens, because she looked for them, and was willing to accept them on their own terms. And she’d been known to frequent some barely-believable wonderlands before, truth be told. She had a well-stamped passport from all sorts of alternative realms and kingdoms.

And now, as the days were getting longer and the sky had long since given up any hope of blue, settling for a steely gray even at noon, Testy walked both sets of streets again, and scanned the buildings, and noted the changes.

“Come on, bub,” she breathed as she went. “Come out, come out, wherever the hell you are. What are you waiting for? You should be here by now. Rachel's gonna give up and go home if we don't hurry.”

NEXT POST: A FORTUNE TELLER'S NIGHTMARE (Friday 12/25 — yes, on Xmas)

Friday, December 18, 2009

A Fall From Grace (Sort Of)

Sphinx lay in the moonlight and contemplated the infinite.

The infinite was not particularly easy to see, from his vantage point. There was a major intersection, a hotel tower, and an airport in the way, not to mention a new, enormous billboard of Venus in full Extravaganza! regalia looking down at him from one side. But he contemplated, anyway, and felt he did an acceptable job most nights. A good enough job to please his own relatively undemanding deity, at least.

And speaking of deities, he’d seen remarkably little of Venus, lately. At least, he’d seen little of Venus in the flesh. The painted version, several stories high and beaming at visitors as they approached from miles away to the South, was more than he needed as a reminder.

There was a time, he thought, when he would have welcomed this solitude. He would have rejoiced, quietly, and celebrated in his meditations. He would have declared himself deity-free, like a house recently swept clean of termites. And he would have thanked the Goddess, sailing over him nightly. He would have prayed, and praised, and offered up a hymn.

But now, he had to admit, he felt mightily out of touch.

He was a little sad, tonight, and more than a little itchy to learn what was going on in town. He listened to the conversations of the tourists and the valet parkers, but they just kept saying the same things. Sphinx was bored with their old gossip.

There was a time, he thought, when he’d known everything.

“Sphinx!”

If Sphinx had had ears, they would have pricked up. A wail, a cry looped through the night, a mixed, braided sound of anguish and of anger, a twine of emotions, a strong rope busily tying itself into a hangman’s noose. It approached.

“Sphinx!”

A shriek, a roar. Not a release. A sound full of rage. It sucked up anger and hurled it out again. The wave of it flattened Sphinx’s marsh grass and warped the glass walls on his ersatz pyramid.

“Sphinx!” Venus had arrived. “Do you know what’s he’s done?!” she screamed.

She was suddenly in front of Sphinx, her glorious hair flying all around her head, her peekaboo robes whipping this way and that. She was attended by a private whirlwind. She was the very picture, Sphinx thought, of a pissed-off goddess. The statue settled down to take in the show.

And no, of course Sphinx didn’t know what “he” had done. He wasn’t even certain who “he” was — probably Zem, but who knew? He cleared his concrete throat with caution. He’d have to finesse Venus for information.

“No,” he offered, “What has he done?”

“He shouldn’t even be here! I told him to go– this is my home, this is my city. And I told him. I demanded it! But he wouldn’t go, and now... He’s hateful, he’s horrible–”

Must still be Zem, Sphinx reasoned.

There was a brief pause while Venus digested her own words. Then the moment passed, and she licked her lips. She tossed her hair. Sphinx reflected that, if she hadn’t been hiding herself from the passersby, those two gestures by themselves could have caused a twelve-car pile-up on the Strip behind her.

He was a little surprised to see that Venus was hiding herself. Usually, when she was this worked up, she forgot. Or else, she just liked being the center of attention so much that she deliberately chose to show off her tantrums. Many times, she had stood out on the Strip and faced Sphinx and yelled at him until a mob of pedestrians had stopped and stared and the cars slowed down so that their drivers could hang out their windows drooling at the gorgeous, insane creature on the sidewalk. Maybe now she was finding her new Extravaganza! stardom taxing. Maybe she just wanted a break from her fans. But the fact that she was being circumspect made Sphinx take the ranting much more seriously. Whatever was going on, Sphinx reckoned, Venus thought it mattered.

“He’s taking over the whole town,” she spat out. Sphinx blinked. Not really, of course, but he did the thing he habitually did to indicate to Venus that he took that information in and was duly shocked. In effect, he blinked.

“He’s enslaved everybody. He’s got them all coming and going for him. The magician’s union worships him now.” Venus, Sphinx knew, had always been a favorite with Vegas’ magicians. They all longed to saw her in half. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it!” Venus screamed, shrill and piercing. Every individual, blond-to-perfection hair on her head stood out separately for a split second, and even the tourists who couldn’t see her looked up at the sound. They felt its passing, a metal-ripping, live-flesh-tearing screeching in the aether as if Mother Nature were ripping her fingernails across the midnight-black chalkboard of the whole desert sky.

“And now he’s after me! He sent that woman, his harpy, his first servant here to tell me. He’s given her immortality, I could see it right away. He sent her to talk to me in my dressing room with Honoré, and she stood there and told me...” Words seemed to fail her. The blond hair flowed of its own accord around her face and out, away again. Her eyes snapped and she bared her teeth and curled her lip. “They expect me to serve him! Take a place in his temple at my hotel. My hotel in my city. Serve him! Do as he bids! Be priestess in his accursed penis-temple there that he’s forcing the hotel to build. He’s mocking me and defiling me and he’s taking my home!”

And there it was, Sphinx concluded. Las Vegas had offered a haven to Venus, a home and sanctuary when the whole rest of the world had outgrown bubbly blondes and eschewed living dolls. Now Zem had arrived without warning, and appropriated the city. Venus had no choices but fight or flight– but Venus hadn’t fought in centuries, and she had nowhere left to run.

Zem has her trapped, the monolith concluded.

The goddess trudged through the mini-swamp to climb up to Sphinx’s paws and slump there, miserable. The angry wind fell away. She leaned over to one side against a concrete toe and hid her face.

The blond cloud drifted down around her like concealing mist shrouding an injured kitten. The kitten was whimpering, sniffing its injuries, licking its wounds. The blond mist made sure it had the privacy it needed.

Sphinx couldn’t really do much in the way of comfort, but he imagined nudging Venus with his paw, to let her know that he was there, and offer some small indication of support. Meanwhile, he thought over what Venus had said.

“Surely the whole city can’t just be rolling over and giving up without any fight at all,” he murmured to himself. “What can he want with it, anyway?”

Venus shifted against him but didn’t speak, so Sphinx assumed she hadn’t heard.

NEXT POST: MEANWHILE, BACK IN NEW YORK... (Monday 12/21)

Monday, December 14, 2009

The Goddess In Training

Magnolia sat at home and thought about this Venus.

She was beautiful, that much was undeniable.

Of course she was beautiful. She was the fucking goddess of love, Magnolia chided silently. Beauty was her stock-in-trade. Beauty looked to her for help when it was having a bad hair day.

Hard to compete with that, Magnolia thought. She pursed her newly plump and now permanently red lips lusciously.

Not that Zem seemed to care for Venus, personally. And the love goddess certainly nurtured no warm, fuzzy feelings for her former master on Olympus. Judging by her reactions tonight, she considered him a major source of unhappiness, the thorn in her lovely, perfect side.

Would that be useful? Or was it another problem? Magnolia considered the thing from all angles, or as many angles as she could think of, and wondered where her best course of action lay.

She’d sat, had Venus, silent and stony-faced, while Magnolia described the Temple of Impotence in all its sleazy single entendre glory. Magnolia had deliberately gotten more flowery as she’d talked, trying to get a reaction from the blonde goddess. But nothing had moved her, nothing had elicited so much as a raised eyebrow, until Magnolia pulled out the sketches.

Then, all hell broke loose. Venus had raged, she’d screamed, she’d torn the pages out of Magnolia’s fingers and ripped them to shreds. She’d ranted and raved and stormed and banged. And then she’d left.

It wasn’t as impressive as Zem’s anger. No lightning bolts, no transformations. Magnolia had watched after her, not realizing at first that the scene was finished. Honoré had watched, too, incensed in her own way at the Temple designs, but mostly just staring open-mouthed at her star.

A full minute after Venus’ exit, Honoré had suddenly realized that her wonder girl might be gone, really gone, and ran out, screaming at stage hands and dancers to find her, find her before they had to cancel the whole show.

Magnolia had sat and surveyed Venus’ dressing room. She fingered all the goddess’ brand-new costumes. The hotel had spared no expense, she noted. The beads were real crystal, and the fabrics were divine– a turn of phrase that made Magnolia smile as she thought it, running a jeweled cape through her fingers. She imagined wearing it, the luxury of feeling it swirl around her as she spun and strode across the huge stage.

Venus didn’t know how good she had it.

Then Magnolia left, too. The backstage of Extravaganza! was in uproar. There was no sign of Venus, no hint of where she’d gone. There was also no chance whatsoever of any of the hundred other Extrav! girls, who wandered the halls aimlessly, filling in for her. The very idea of an understudy to the Love Goddess was laughable.

Magnolia walked out frowning, thinking dark thoughts. Her own position in this pantheon was new and precarious enough without ancient goddesses, she considered. Would there have to be a Battle of the Blondes in the near future? In that case, she would have to study up, to find out what made this one tick, and how to beat her. Or, maybe, how to manipulate her.

Magnolia did not intend to let has-been deities interfere with her position. Or her prospects. If Mount Olympus was going to be reborn in Vegas, well, she intended it to have a new addition, a certain former human, former male, beauty of the modern world.

But that was in the future. Meanwhile, she could report to Zem that his minimal competition in town wasn’t offering much of a threat today. From Venus’ grand exit, the erstwhile mayor imagined it would be a long time before she so much as showed her face again, let alone mounted any real resistence to her one-time Ruler.

And by that time, Zem would be securely installed and in charge, Magnolia concluded, and she, herself, might have climbed a few steps higher on the god-ladder. She ran her long fingernails through her hair, tossed it, and walked out amid the raging chaos of a goddess-less Extravaganza!

NEXT POST: FALL FROM THE TOPLESS OLYMPUS (Friday 12/18)

Friday, December 11, 2009

Prelude to a Battle of the Blondes

Magnolia closed the door behind her as Honoré sat down at her desk. Gina had been kicked out.
“Mother.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Magnolia sighed. “Miss Honoré, then,” she said, exaggerating.

“That’ll do, Magnolia.”

“Can we just see this girl?”

Honoré looked up, and her face glowed. Magnolia studied her expression. If any of Extravaganza!’s dancers from the past thirty years had seen that smile, they would have been shocked. Miss Honoré, smiling and soft and looking happy?! Magnolia was only slightly less startled.

“What has she done to you?” she asked.

“What? Nothing.” All the accustomed hardness was back. Honoré sat back, reaching for her cigarettes and lighter. The lighter was a heavy-duty Zippo, and Honoré demonstrated the muscles it had developed in her forearm as she flicked its lever. “Sit down. Let’s go over what you’re going to ask her.”

Magnolia pulled out Gina’s desk chair and made herself at home, settling slowly and giving her mother ample time to notice her new figure. She’d lost ten pounds in the last week alone. All the curves she’d ever dreamed of having were in evidence.

There was no word from the other desk. Magnolia crossed her newly-perfect legs and watched her mother’s smoke curl around her face. “I’m not going to ask her anything. I’m going to tell her what’s going to happen. This hotel has plans for your girl, Venus.”

Honoré took a deep drag. All the tendrils of smoke around her seemed to suck in the air in unison. Magnolia felt the atmosphere getting stiff. “Maybe she won’t do it,” Miss Honoré suggested.

Magnolia shrugged. “Then she won’t work in Vegas. This is a city-wide initiative, Mother, not some whim from a minor executive.”

“I told you not to call me that. What if someone heard?”

“We’re in a closed office. And your cast knows much better than to listen at your door.”

Honoré smiled ever-so-slightly, thinking, perhaps, of the French girl she’d had deported for doing precisely that in the days when she’d been having an at-work affair with one of the stage managers.

“Even so,” she warned.

Magnolia sighed. Honoré watched her through slitted eyes. Her offspring had rarely behaved as she’d expected, ever since she’d shown up at Extrav!’s original auditions and blown away the competition. She’d been the best thing onstage till Venus arrived, but when they’d sat down on that first day to deal with the contracts, Magnolia had handed hers back with a smile that made even Miss Honoré quail, just a bit. Magnolia had said, “Thank you mother. Europe was wonderful. It changed my life. As you can see.” Honoré had looked her up and down without a word, inspecting the work she’d had done, and nodded. And thus was their new, improved relationship begun.

Honoré found Magnolia more interesting than she had Frank. She tacked one of Magnolia’s campaign posters up backstage each time she ran for mayor. But Magnolia had another thing coming if she thought she could waltz in here and dictate what Venus did on stage or even– Honoré could barely form the thought, let alone speak the words– take her away. Now, Honoré sucked on her cigarette– the smoke poured through what was left of her lungs like a derelict rattling through a tumbledown house– and looked at her child whom she’d never wanted. “What’s going on, exactly?” she demanded.

“Big things,” Magnolia smiled. “Vegas is going through a metamorphosis.”

Honoré snorted. “Another one? Since the corporations took over, it’s one change after another. Every year there’s something new. It’s endless.”

“This will be really new. And it’ll stick,” Magnolia said.

“We’ll see. What’s up with Venus?”

Magnolia’s smile quirked higher and she tilted her head to look at her mother. “You seem very taken with her, Honoré,” she said. “I’ve never seen you care so much about one of your girls.”

“She’s the whole show these days,” Honoré answered gruffly. She coughed, then sucked in the last breath of the cigarette, suffocating it. She flicked the butt into the huge, granite ashtray that took up a square foot of her desk. It landed on a three-inch pyramid of burn-outs. “You haven’t seen her, have you? You don’t care about anything else when you see her. All the other kids– they might as well go home. They might as well not show up in the first place. Maybe we’ll cut all of them next contract. Who needs ‘em? Venus is the show.”

“Interesting,” Magnolia said. “She may not be the show for much longer.”

Honoré had been reaching for her pack and her Zippo. She refused to pause at Magnolia’s words. “Don’t try that, Magnolia,” she said. “This girl is Extravaganza! You don’t want to pull her out and destroy this show and get all the bad publicity from that. Besides what I can–” She looked at her daughter, slowed the act of lighting her cigarette to a crawl, went through the motions without blinking. Magnolia looked back. …what I can tell about you hung in the air between them. Honoré didn’t speak the words.

They each had a threat to hold over the other. Magnolia didn’t understand the power of hers– why should Honoré still care who knew about her single indiscretion, or whomever it had been with?– but that would never stop her from wielding it. For her own part, the secret of Frank O’Connor getting out seemed a lot less cataclysmic since her trip to the top of the Spire. Eternal youth and beauty were wonderful cures for all kinds of anxiety. Magnolia preened a bit, and reached back to fluff her hair. It had been getting gradually blonder, all on its own, for the past week, and had grown till it brushed artfully against her shoulders.

“It’s not in my hands,” she said. “I’m just the messenger. Now let’s go see Venus and I’ll tell you both what’s up for her future.” She stood, and waited while Honoré, cigarette smoldering and Zippo clenched in bony fingers, left her chair and led the way out of the room.

NEXT POST: THE GODDESS IN TRAINING (Monday 12/14)

Monday, December 7, 2009

The Goddess Is In

“Have you heard from your friend yet?” Rachel asked Testy.

“No. I’ll let you know when I do.”

They were sitting in Belle’s living room. The Rockette herself had gone to bed, but she was still with them in spirit, in the form of an even dozen cats. Rachel petted Partly Cloudy, while Testy communed with On Location and Lauer between attaching rhinestones to a deep blue dress that could have doubled as a refrigerator cozy.

“Will you?” Rachel asked nervously.

“Yes, honey. I will. Don’t worry. Haven’t you been having fun?”

“Yes,” Rachel admitted. “But now it’s getting colder.”

A moment went by. Some cats purred.

“He’ll come,” Testy reassured her. “Soon.”

“He’d better,” the ex-showgirl grumbled.

Meanwhile, back in Vegas, a completely different sort of scene was playing out.

Miss Honoré knocked on Venus' dressing room door. “Venus, dear,” she said as she entered. And then she paused, because Venus was standing almost nude before her, waiting in her tiny g-string for her dresser to put on her costume.

The first sight of Venus was always breathtaking.

“Lovely,” Honoré breathed, barely audibly. Then: “Venus,” she started again, “I wonder, could you get dressed quickly so we’ll have some time before the show?”

Venus looked more or less in her direction and made a half-shrug. The gesture and her expression seemed to say that she had only the vaguest notion any show was going on, and that she wasn’t entirely sure who Honoré was. She certainly had no idea, that look said, about the time. Time was beneath her.

“It’s nothing, really,” Honoré continued as Venus stepped into her fishnets and let the dresser roll them up. “The hotel has a new project they’d like to involve you in. There’s someone coming in who wants to meet you and explain it. So I’ll bring her by in a little bit, and we’ll find out together what she wants, all right?”

Venus made a movement with her head that Honoré took for a nod. She licked her dry lips and looked down at the clipboard she carried while the dresser hooked Venus’ fishnets to her g-string. “Good then. I’ll come back in fifteen minutes and we’ll talk. Now, for the show. There are ten boys tonight, John’s still out sick, I sent him home, so Terrence and Boyd will lift you in the Finale.” Her dancers were, for the first time in history, fighting to work, whether they were ill or injured or at death’s door. The chance to rub shoulders with the Most Beautiful Girl In the World was worth it. But Honoré had no intention of letting any unhealthy germs free in the theater. She couldn’t imagine Venus with a cold, but she was taking no chances. The cast had to pass muster. They had to prove their fitness to back up the Star each night. And she’d been sending them home regularly, a slump-shouldered, dejected stream trickling from her office, through the corridors, to the stage door. They knew not to dillydally or try to stick around for glimpses of Venus. If Honoré caught them at that, when she’d dismissed them already, their lives, not to mention their contracts, might well be forfeit. “… and you’ll be escorted by four singers in Big Bows, not six,” she finished. “Nothing else should change, I don’t think…” she made check marks on the paper, “unless someone else gets a cough, and then all bets are off.” She looked up and smiled, but Venus had turned back to the mirror, where she traced the line of her right breast with her left index finger. “Good then,” Honoré croaked, her throat achingly dry all of a sudden. “I’ll be back.”

As she walked back out to the corridor she checked again for passersby, and seeing gratefully that there weren’t any, she leaned against the wall and breathed heavily until her heartbeat steadied.

That girl would be the death of her.

If she were lucky, she thought.

NEXT POST: A PROLOGUE TO THE BATTLE OF THE BLONDES (Friday 12/11)

Friday, December 4, 2009

Magnolia Blossoms

Magnolia Posey Connor, nee Frank Hubert O’Connor, stood in her bedroom, naked, and looked at herself in the wall of mirrors that faced her bed.

The room was sumptuous. The house was a work of art. It had been built as just another tract MacMansion, but a showboy friend of Magnolia's from the old days had done it up, decorated and painted until it was unrecognizable. The mayor's house was almost as famous as she was.

"We're both works of art," she joked privately, and let people assume she was referring to her political career.

Sometimes, late at night when she couldn’t sleep, Magnolia walked through her whole house and imagined giving Honoré a tour. She saw her mother admiring the expensive decor, the few carefully chosen pieces of classic sculpture in which Magnolia had been convinced to invest, the one or two good paintings and baubles she’d had placed here and there to impress those who knew good things.

Honoré had never, quite, been invited. But Magnolia still hoped that she’d come, knock on the door some afternoon with a much-belated housewarming gift of teas and jams, or a spray of flowers. Magnolia knew, in her more realistic moments, that what her mother would bring, if she ever did, in fact, turn up at the front door, would be a haze of nicotine and a pointed disapproval of all she saw, but fantasy is a great comfort to the needy, and Magnolia Posey Connor, nee Frank Hubert O’Connor, considered herself unquestionably needy when it came to mothers.

"If Honore could see me now," she murmured. She stood nude in her bedroom in front of a whole wall of mirrors and admired herself. The goods were looking good, at this moment. Better and better since her negotiation with Zem. She turned right and left, inspecting his work. He had certainly reinvigorated what she saw before her.

Immortality was good, Magnolia thought, but eternal youth was good right now.

Her ass had lifted. That was the latest. Last week, her thighs had tightened and toned, and her neck and chin had gotten firmer, and then this morning, when she’d caught a look at herself in the gold-tinged mirror that covered one wall of her bathroom, she realized, her ass was higher.

Magnolia’s ass, in her heyday, had been one of her star features. Her tits had always been on the small side. Nice, pert, and well-shaped, but small. She’d considered, more than once over the years when she was dancing, having them enhanced surgically. They weren’t original equipment anyway, she reasoned, but just two among the many results of the hormones she took daily. Why shouldn’t she upgrade, spend a few bucks and get herself a more impressive pair? But she’d hesitated, realizing that plastic surgery was forever and she might not always want to be a D cup. She’d been prescient, because although boob jobs were common in Vegas—plastic surgery of all kinds was common, with more doctors per capita than anywhere else in the world except for Century City and Buenas Aires—she doubted whether even the voters in this permissive city would have seen past them to elect her. Or whether the Old Boys at City Hall would have been able to look her in the eye if they had.

But her butt… well, it had been her best attribute, when she had spun around a pole at Frankie Gallagher’s After Dark All Star Gentlemen’s World.

“I do good work,” Zem said.

“You do,” she agreed, straightening slowly and refusing to startle. He’d started simply appearing in her presence more and more. Now that she was a fellow immortal, he'd dropped all pretense of appearing normally human. “I could make a million bucks back in the strip clubs, if this plan of yours fails.”

“If my plan were to fail, you’d be in no shape to make a dollar,” he said.

“Good thing it can’t fail, then,” she said. “It can’t, can it?”

He snorted. He hadn’t moved since he’d appeared. It unnerved Magnolia sometimes, how still he could stand. As if, as a god, he were so alien to humanness that even the most deeply assumed habits of shifting weight, drumming fingers, blinking, swallowing, were unnecessary and distasteful. He was becoming more godlike, if that were the test, almost every day.

“This is not a two-bit heist, Magnolia. You’re not living out some Sixties caper movie. Remember who I am.”

“I never forget that,” she assured him. She threw a silk robe on and walked up to look at him. Magnolia was a tall woman, not surprising for either a transsexual or a former showgirl, and Zem stood only four or five inches taller. But he towered, he loomed, and sometimes even as she looked at him, standing preternaturally still like now, she wondered that his head didn’t crush a hole in her ceiling. “You are a god. Will you ever tell me what you’ve been up to, all these centuries?”

He snorted again, crushing the stillness. “Are you planning on writing a tell-all?” he asked. She thought—hoped—he was teasing.

“You never know,” she cocked a grin up at him. “It could be good for marketing. In a year or so, when the world is hungry for details of you.”

“Oh yes, the tabloid version,” he nodded wisely, then shook his head. “The world doesn’t need to re-learn its own history through my eyes. The people can imagine whatever they like between Olympus and Vegas.”

“What are you looking at?” she asked. He'd been gazing over her shoulder into the mirror.

“You’re looking more like Venus as your body tones,” he answered. He stepped away from her. “I’m going,” he said.

“Wait—was there something you wanted?” she asked. Why had he shown up tonight, anyway?

He looked down at her and smiled. “No,” he told her. “Nothing. I thought I’d join you, as you were enjoying yourself so much.” His cheeks creased as he smiled at her, but his eyes were still calculating.

There was something else he’d done, although Magnolia hadn’t asked for it. She glanced back at herself in the mirror, now, and something that was almost a shiver ran down her spine and through her. Zem had made her beautiful, immortal… and female, through and through and in her every cell and hormone.

She’d been a woman, pragmatically, for more than half her life, now. She’d gotten the surgery when she was barely an adult, in Sweden, where America’s Puritan ideas had never taken hold and gender was understood as just one more medical condition. And then she’d spent a couple years in what she’d thought of as “training” around Europe. She’d crowded her way into every cattle call in Paris, and eventually worked all the top Paris nightclubs: Lido de Paris, the Moulin Rouge, even the tired old Folies Bergere for a few months. She’d learned how to walk, how to do her makeup, how to get noticed and take control in the ways women could, that men knew nothing of. She’d always sensed that real power required a pair of breasts, a working cunt. The Swedes had given her the equipment. Paris had taught her how to wield it. When she arrived back in Vegas, she’d become untouchable, unquestionably the most womanly of any woman ever seen.

But her body, like those of all transsexuals, had never forgotten its history. Magnolia had a very discreet doctor, who’d faithfully taken care of her needs and supplied the hormones she required for many years, mostly because she had photographic evidence of what he did with young boys when his wife was out of town. Her body had never betrayed her, as some of her gender-reassigned sisters’ had; it had never reacted badly to the pills, never developed untoward symptoms as she aged and her physiology adjusted.

But then Zem had granted her petition for ageless beauty, and as a bonus he’d thrown in the Holy Grail of all transsexuals, genetic femininity. She hadn’t realized the change till she’d gotten slightly sick and gone for a checkup. Her doctor had done tests and told her, looking confused, to try going off the pills. Magnolia had been terrified, imagining black stubble sprouting on her jaw, her warm, honeyed voice dropping an octave, and her breasts exiting stage right and left in a flash.

None of that happened. She grew more feminine. Her skin actually improved. Her laugh took on a lilt she’d never heard before. Her breasts grew perkier as youth took hold. She threw the pills down the drain and asked Zem, knowing from his grin before he spoke what he had done.

“I just gave you what you really wanted,” he’d said.

“Thank you,” she’d answered, even though the change alarmed her. She wondered what was going on beneath her skin. She lay awake at night, sometimes, feeling as though tiny aliens had invaded her body and were rebuilding it, ripping things out and creating other structures while she kept walking through her days, trying to adjust on the fly.

What has he done to me, she wondered.

“You’re welcome,” Zem said again, now, in her bedroom. She looked up at him still watching her, reading the course of her thoughts but showing none of her uncertainty at their import.

Of course he’s not uncertain, she remonstrated herself. He’s never questioned anything he’s done in his whole millennia-long existence!

“That’s right, my dear,” he told her, reading those thoughts, too. “Certainty is the gift of the gods, you know. It’s what sets us higher than mere mortals.” His cheeks creased as he smiled deeper, and his cheekbones rose and his eyes crinkled, and Magnolia thought Jesus, he can almost out-do Santa Claus when he gets going– the world’s going to fall right into his hand!

“Yes,” he told her. “That’s exactly what they’re going to do. They always do.”

There was the slight sucking noise that happened when he went. The air around where he’d been standing rushed in, and the sudden vacuum was filled. Magnolia fancied she heard chuckling from the empty space, but there was no telling if it came from Zem’s mouth, or just the air itself, amused at her.

The air itself seemed to have eyes, these days, to be watching her, just as Fletch and all his cronies had watched her on the runway. At any moment, she thought, some invisible admirer might slip a bill down her lace, thong panties. That would amuse Zem, wouldn’t it?

There might have been more chuckling. Maybe Zem had heard her thought again. She shivered, wondering if she might find cash beneath her robe when she slipped it off.

She didn’t want to look. She pulled the belt tighter around her newly trim waist and knotted it.

The air around her held too many eyes. Zem’s two were far too many. He, by himself, she thought, was more than enough audience for any woman.

NEXT POST: AN AUDIENCE WITH THE DIVINE (Monday 12/7)

Monday, November 30, 2009

Love, Inc.

Magnolia burst into Zem’s hotel room at Bombay. “Have you changed my plans for the Grand?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

She bore down on him across enough lush carpeting to cover a fairway. If Zem should take a notion to tee off inside Bombay’s Ganesh Suite, all he’d need was a caddy and a five iron. “You know you’ve put them months behind,” she burst out when she reached his couch.

He was watching television, a new habit that particularly drove her mad. Not that she minded having something else around to amuse him, besides her. The TV and its hosts and actors provided a very useful divine babysitting service, as far as Magnolia was concerned. But when she wanted his attention these days, she had trouble disengaging him from leering at beach babes, or scoffing at game shows.

“They were almost finished with the Temple of Small Coin,” she raged on at him. “It was going to fit beautifully into their new low-limit slot area. Now they’ve had to start all over. What the hell’s going on?”

Zem paused as he flipped among fifty channels faster than she could focus. He looked her over, and raised his eyebrows milding. “What’s wrong with you?”

He didn’t really care, she knew. She walked around and joined him on the couch. “Oh, nothing,” she rolled her eyes. She’d given up all but an hour or two of sleep a night, these past months. She’d hustled endlessly from City Hall to architects’ offices to every boardroom in every hotel in Southern Nevada, over and over, to complete the rebuilding plans. And she’d successfully kept the city running and kept the press from uncovering the Great Zem Plan, to boot. But then, apparently, last week sometime, Zem had wandered oh-so-casually into the office of Skip Thompson, CEO of the Grand Hotel. And, over coffee or shots or whatever afternoon indulgence Skip favored, he’d mentioned some regrets about the relatively unglamourous attraction the Grand had drawn in Magnolia’s scheme.

“What are you thinking?” she demanded now.

“It’s Venus,” he shrugged. “Now, look at that,” he waved a hand at the screen. “All that purple goo dumps on the kid’s head because he couldn’t hit the target, but is it acid? Is it heated oil? No, it’s just melted jelly, or something. Who cares?” He shook his head in disgust. “These human game shows are so disappointing. If the losers don’t die at the end, what’s the point?”

Magnolia considered his profile. If Zem hosted a game show, she thought, we could offer real prizes: life or death, irreversible transformations if contestants displeased him, rewards beyond human imagining... Not to mention that Zem’s smooth smiles and cunning glances to the camera would seduce the masses– whatever masses were left that hadn’t already succumbed to his promises of well-being and reassurance.

She blinked, filed the notion under “Things to Do: 2005" folded her arms across her chest, and waited for a commercial break.

“What about Venus?” Magnolia asked in an opportune moment. Zem, luckily, had no interest in cleanser ads.

“We can’t ignore her,” Zem said.

“We can’t?” she asked rhetorically. Magnolia had heard of Honoré’s new wonder girl. Of course she’d heard. All Vegas was gossiping about her. She was the hottest thing on the Strip since… well, since the Strip itself. The eternal Streisand was having some trouble trumping her in terms of New Year’s Eve ticket sales, and word was the recording diva was not happy about that.

She looked down at the sketches she was holding, and uncrumpled them slightly. She’d snatched them off Skip’s desk and stormed directly over here, her posse straggling in her wake.

“We never thought of impotence,” Zem commented. He grinned at her. The commercials reflected against the corners of his eyes. “It’s perfect. With Venus? The Goddess of Love?” His grin widened and turned into a leer, and he winked at her like a greasy conventioneer in a two-bit suit looking for a cheap whore to bring his Vegas fantasy to complete fulfillment. “I bet there’ll be balding fat men lined up for miles to see her.”

Magnolia swore there were actually glints in his pupils, somewhere behind the reflected TV images. Tiny, mocking lightning flashes. “Hm,” she said. She looked again at the plans. And she let her imagination go to work.

A gigantic shaft plunged through the Grand’s casino ceiling, extending five floors up and down. It required an atrium, with viewing balconies on every level. From the gaming tables, it would merely be a column. But when one stood beneath it, looking up, when the whole affair became visible, especially that cap thing on top…

Magnolia laughed in spite of herself. “And what is Venus supposed to do?” she asked. She couldn’t be the real Goddess of Love, could she? “What will constitute the cure? Or the ceremony, for that matter? Are you planning on an endless orgy? Or something more private—”

“Oh, orgies all around, definitely,” Zem said. “I think we should sell tickets, and make the poor buggers perform with Venus for the public. Or with each other, maybe, if she’s busy. One sex act and they’ll be cured, of course, no matter what their problem is. Psychological, biological— I’ll guarantee they’ll function from that moment. And along the way they’ll get a shot at the most desirable woman who ever graced the earth. A little audience is a small price to pay,” he shrugged.

“What about Venus, herself? Won’t she mind the crowd?”

He settled himself deeper into his couch. “Get me more of these grapes, will you?” he said.

“Hm,” Magnolia said pensively.

Venus in Las Vegas? The real, true Goddess of Love, embodiment of desire, making a living as a showgirl? It was far too silly to consider.

But then, as Magnolia stood behind Zem’s chair and listened to him shout answers about historical wars and great disasters at game show contestants, she reflected that silliness was relative. She pursed her lips and made a note on the sketches, then rolled them up and left the suite. Zem never noticed.

Perhaps the time had come to check in with her old boss and unacknowledged parent, Miss Honoré Jerques, she decided.

NEXT POST: BACKSTAGE FANTASY (Friday 12/4)

Friday, November 27, 2009

The Star of the Show

Miss Honoré Jerques knew a thing or two about showgirls. She’d been one, herself, long, long ago when the business was different and a pretty girl could still get somewhere in this town. Now it was all so shallow, all so sleazy. Vegas had been going downhill ever since the last Mob family had been run out in the Seventies, as far as she was concerned.

Miss Honoré had known the Mob. She’d liked them. And she was just the kind of girl they liked. She’d started as a dancer in the line at the old Thunderbird, then moved on to the Gold Rush and the Flamingo hotels. The girls shared the stages with big name stars, in those days, doing a number or two before Tommy Dorsey, or Rosemary Clooney, or Edgar Bergen came out to do their bit. Honoré Jerques had worked behind the best. And she’d shone just as brightly as they did. She remembered it as if it were yesterday.

But then, just when the hotels started building bigger showrooms, and the Stardust took the radical step of staging a full-time production show, an American version of the fabled Lido de Paris, instead of star acts, she’d retired. She stepped off stage for the last time and moved into management. The Golden Era of Vegas’ stage shows, the days of Lido and Casino de Paris and Folies Bergere’s Las Vegas outposts passed her by– Honoré spent the Fifties and Sixties hiring other girls for smaller shows and teaching them how to strut their stuff. She bided her time and she proved her mettle.

And when ground was broken for the Grand Hotel, and rumors were swirling about its showroom, the largest and most grandiose ever, anywhere, Honoré was first in line to take the reins. She signed on a whole year before the first audition. And she sat through every meeting, every rehearsal, till Extravaganza! debuted in May, 1969. It was the biggest hit Vegas had ever seen, and ran for six years. Its successor, Extravaganza! 2 opened in ‘75, with a pre-Bicentennial, red, white, and blue finale that was still legendary among those who remembered. And by the time that show closed and Extrav! 3 replaced it in ‘82, Miss Honoré was an institution and had never thought of leaving.

Now, three decades later, she reigned from her smoke-yellowed desk in the bowels of the Grand, and hired and fired and shuffled contracts, and effortlessly terrorized one hundred twenty children with flawless bodies and bright smiles and, when she was lucky, perfectly empty minds.

And most recently, just three weeks ago, in fact, when her show had outlived all its competition, when the hotel no longer wanted to spend any money on entertainment, when production shows were said to be out-of-date and passé and no longer worth their cost, Miss Honoré had found a girl who might just perpetuate the run of Extravaganza! and the popularity of tits and feathers and the mystique of Vegas itself for another lifetime or two. Venus was the stuff of legend, a bombshell like the nostalgic memories of bombshells. As Honoré stood at the back of the theater and watched her, the showroom was fuller than it had ever been. Word had spread. They’d had to move in chairs, make space for more tables. Extravaganza! was the hot ticket on the Strip again. Venus was indescribable, she was a sensation.

Miss Honoré smiled to herself like a cat that had just swallowed something chirping and fluffy. She leaned against the back wall of the theater, just to one side of the huge gilt doors that opened out into the Grand Hotel casino, her arms folded across her ample chest. She spared a moment to curse the day smoking had been outlawed in the audience. She wanted a cigarette, she thought, just like the good old days when she used to sit in a King’s Row booth and watch the whole show, beginning to end, with a fag in one hand and a whiskey in the other. Those were the days. Now everything was so god-damned clean and sober and healthy and respectable, you’d think Vegas had been bought by Disney. Which maybe it had. Who could keep track of the corporations, or who owned whom and had a finger in which pie? When the Mob was here, you knew who was who and who owed whom and whom to ask for what you wanted. In those days everybody had a name, and the important guys had only one– Tony, or Gino, or Stu– easy names you could keep straight. And if you were a pretty girl, or even if you were a handsome woman who had once been a pretty girl, your path was pretty much assured.

Now she couldn’t smoke and couldn’t drink, and she had to treat her dancers with respect, for god’s sake, as if they were little princesses and corporate heirs. It was like a nursery school back there, she thought, full of spoiled children who didn’t know the first thing about Vegas or what they were doing or all the girls who’d gone before. They thought they were something special, but she could tell ‘em they didn’t know special, they hadn’t even seen special–

Except for Venus. Miss Honoré looked up at her new star, and Venus didn’t disappoint. She stood there, barely moving, certainly not doing anything you’d call dancing, because why should she? Why waste the effort? Nobody would notice. Venus was just standing and walking and looking here and there, and she was perfect, she commanded the whole stage around her, she was the sum total of everything that Miss Honoré had ever believed Las Vegas had to offer, the pinnacle, the height, the ultimate, exemplary, point-for-point perfect fulfillment of a showgirl. She was Vegas Glamour, in one tall, blond package. She was Pussy Galore squared and cubed, what Pussy only dreamt of being, and Miss Honoré stared at her, and she thought that if she had ever liked girls, if she had ever once in her long life felt any inkling whatsoever to go dabbling in a bit of slit, Venus would have been the one. She found herself licking her lips without even thinking about it, and she didn’t care if her packed-on lipstick got smeared. The room all around her was dead-silent, there were 1376 pairs of eyes riveted to the stage, and if there had been an earthquake at that moment, no one in the room would have moved a muscle till Venus completed her slow walk. Then they would have panicked.

Miss Honoré, herself, had come out to watch every number Venus did in every show since she had opened. The hapless Gina would ask every time if she didn’t want to skip one. Surely the stairs were too hard for her over and over. Surely the show was fine, would take care of itself, surely Miss Honoré didn’t need to be out there each time anymore.

But Miss Honoré brushed her aside and climbed the stairs and made her way out here again and again, without fail. She was sure she would be doing it for months and months, for as long as she could keep that girl in the show, for the rest of her life, if she could manage that, somehow. Now, she watched Venus pout, and pounce on a boy no one had noticed coming up to her. They danced a little, which mostly meant Venus stood and scowled at him while he approached and retreated, dancing near her in what used to be a pas de deux. Miss Honoré had had it re-staged for Venus, of course.

She took a sudden breath, realizing that she hadn’t breathed in longer than she could remember. You forgot mundane things like breathing when you were watching Venus. She found herself trying not to blink for fear she’d miss something. Some move, some gesture. Some hint of something. Something vital. Venus doing anything. Venus being– that was vital.

Miss Honoré leaned back again, relaxed as the crowd exploded into applause. Venus had left the stage, but they didn’t care what came next. All they wanted was to worship her, see her, and then wait eagerly for her next number. Miss Honoré smiled to herself, her arms folded, her fingers tapping quietly against her arm.

There was a photo shoot tomorrow. All new pictures were planned for the showroom’s entrance– all of Venus, naturally. Miss Honoré had organized the shoot, made plans to have it downstairs where they’d use all the costumes and any set that girl could curl herself onto. She’d make this goddam show look good no matter how tired and tatty it had gotten, no matter how badly it needed new costumes, refurbished sets, an overhauled sound system, better lights. Miss Honoré had struggled for seventeen years to get the show maintained, to get the pinheads who ran Vegas now to see the value of throwing a little money her way now and then, but her message was lost, ignored.

Now, the money was suddenly coming. The executive boys in their suits were tripping over each other to pour new cash into old Extravaganza! They did it just to have the chance to come “check in” on their investment. They did it for Venus, so that she might smile at them when she tried on the new costume they’d bought for her.

The irony was, of course... who cared? After seventeen years, Extravaganza! desperately needed to be cleaned up, but with Venus in it, no one noticed, anyway. No one would notice if the roof fell down on top of half the cast. As long as Venus stood there in her g-string and her heels, the world could go to hell for all this audience cared. But still, it was a little vindication for Miss Honoré. Miss Honoré would make the most of things, as only she knew how to do.

She and Venus. They would be a team. Whether that girl even realized it or not.

Miss Honoré watched Venus enter for Big Bows and stand there in the hugest costume that had been available, one enormous gingham bow that sat squarely on her perfect ass, the largest bustle ever seen, a wrapping for a present every man here, and every woman, too, would give his eye teeth, his life savings, his life and the life of everyone he loved to unwrap.

Venus minced and pouted her way down to the very apron of the stage and stood looming above the front row. All the men down there, and what few women had fought to get one of those seats, leaned forward, staring with their mouths open.

Miss Honoré leaned forward too, and she watched Venus and she watched the audience. The number was almost over. Venus turned and swung the bow, and then she paused to face the crowd one more time– in times past, Before Venus, there had been a line of girls who did that, but now there was only her, only the goddess, and who needed any others? They could fire the whole cast, probably, and no one would notice. Miss Honoré watched and smiled like a big and cunning cat, and the audience held its collective breath and stopped blinking to capture every single nuance of every single move that Venus made. Miss Honoré’s fingers twitched as if they held the cigarette she’d be longing for in precisely thirty seconds, and she held her breath, too, until the explosion came and all around her there was wild cheering.

NEXT POST: LOVE, INC (Monday 11/30)

Monday, November 23, 2009

Inspiring Magnolia

The boy scouts had gotten into trouble again, so Magnolia led them on their matching leashes through the casino of the Vegas Spire. Their baas and shufflings got laughs from the crowd, and elicited pets and cooings, but Magnolia forged on, making her way to the special elevator that led only to the roof, and sparing only the barest of smiles and nods to anyone who made eye contact.

She had no posse today, only a pair of guards who had been instructed, in no uncertain terms, to keep their distance. They’d remain here, in the casino, while she went about her private business.

She had a date with Zem this afternoon. Or, at least, she planned to speak with Zem, to confront him. This would be their most important conference yet, which he had no idea was coming. It would determine all future relations, not to mention who would run this city, who would serve him, and what would happen to her.

The whole world, if it had known what she was planning, should have been fixed on Magnolia’s passage through the Spire, goats in tow, that afternoon.

She didn’t have as much time as she would have liked. Her schedule was booked tight, these days. She zipped from meeting to meeting, hotel to hotel, with an hour or two at City Hall whenever she could fit it in. The bureaucrats and staff there would descend on her, waving papers and clipboards. Her personal assistant, Peter, had been seen to cry last week as she disappeared after only a few minutes’ visit, having answered not one of his questions.

But the New Las Vegas was happening fast, so she had no time to waste. Today, when Dan and Sam had transformed in the middle of a screaming match at Bombay with Errol Manoff and Jim Bubo and three other casino heads, everybody had just rolled their eyes. Magnolia had checked her watch, observed the rest of the table restacking notes and discussing when to reconvene, and headed out as soon as possible. She’d never have taken the goats along if Errol hadn’t insisted.

And she would have dropped them off at their own office if she’d had time. But she only had an hour. Then she’d promised Peter she’d come back, for the whole afternoon, to sign things and make mayoral decisions. These damn Boy Scouts would have to come along for the ride.

She couldn’t leave them in the car, where they would inevitably destroy the upholstery and stink up the place. So here they were, slowing her down as she marched through tourists and slot machines. The elevator operator looked down his nose at them.

“Mayor,” he acknowledged.

“I’m going up,” she announced. “And they’re going with me. Sorry– I’ll try to keep the damage to a minimum.”

He hesitated, but then nodded and pulled aside the ornate gate and ushered her and her charges inside. “Have a good trip,” he invited.

Magnolia snorted.

Zem’s Hall of Audience had been finished for a month– the very first of Zem’s “attractions” to debut. The small cosmetic augmentations to the Spire’s roof had gone quickly once workmen had been hired– a more difficult task than usual, given the particular requirements of the job. In the end, the “mile-high crew” had bonded like survivors of a natural disaster. They’d probably be holding reunions till they were all dead, Magnolia thought.

There’d been a wild party after it was done, but Magnolia had merely put in an appearance and then run back downstairs, where the wind did not whip napkins and whole serving trays down to their destruction far below. The place gave her the creeps, for all that it was her idea. Zem, of course, loved it. He’d stayed up there, often right by the edge staring down at his developing realm, from mid-afternoon till sunrise the next day– or so she’d been told. The waiters were asleep on their feet by the time he left, tying themselves to anything handy to keep from stumbling off the edge in the dark.

And now Zem’s New Vegas was initiated, and the god’s ear was available to anyone who took the long ride. Of course, after January 1st, getting into this elevator would be much more difficult than merely walking up and stepping in. The regular elevators to the Spire’s peak, the ones that carried countless tourists up the its top floor restaurants, bars, and observation decks, cost $20. This private ride would cost nothing, but only those who’d proved their worth beyond all doubt would be allowed.

For the moment, though, the Lift to Destiny was just an anonymous door watched over by a man in a suit at a lectern. It might have led to a private penthouse, or the hotel’s steakhouse.

Magnolia drummed her fingers and pulled the hem of her skirt out of a goat’s mouth. She wasn’t sure what she’d do with them at the top. She wasn’t sure if they understood human speech when they were in this state, but she didn’t want them close enough to hear, in case they did. “Stupid goats,” she told them. They looked up at her, and one of them– she thought it was probably Sam, who always seemed the more recalcitrant even in this form– reached out to chew her skirt again. She flicked his face. “Away,” she said.

The elevator ride took five minutes. Zem had specified a slow, shaky ride– he didn’t want his petitioners striding into his presence too cockily. There was a boom as it reached its goal, and then a shifting, and a twist, and finally, several seconds later, the doors opened.

The wind was the first thing one noticed. Magnolia felt it hit her full in the face. The goats’ hair blew back, and they baa-ed in complaint and shook their snouts.

“Come on, you,” she jerked their leads.

Stepping out into the Hall itself was like climbing onto the roof of a 747 for a stroll at several thousand feet. Magnolia bent her knees instinctively, and braced against the air as it boomed into the elevator. The Hall stretched away before her, a barbell-shaped pavement lined with marble columns and ending in a sheer dropoff as the roof underneath sloped away. From this doorway, she could see the city through the columns, as distant as a mirage and as tiny as an architect’s model. She thought suddenly of all the mock-ups of new hotels she’d admired over the years, and grimaced sourly to think how unlike the reality they’d proved.

“This way,” she growled at the goats.

There wasn’t much to secure them to. But the elevator was flanked by two huge urns– the original flower arrangements they’d held had blown away in seconds, and rained down in shreds over the north end of the Strip– and she looped their leashes through a handle and tied them to each other.

“Now stay there,” she told them, and turned her back to stride away.

At least, that was what she meant to do. Striding down the length of the Hall, announcing herself at its furthest end, the Place of Audience between the last two pillars, where all the earth lay somewhere miles below her feet and her toes rested practically on thin air... that was her intention. But, as she’d found at that horrid party, her control over her own muscles was suddenly curtailed, and she froze on the spot.

Magnolia was afraid of heights. She’d known this about herself, discovered it on one ill-fated trip up the Eiffel Tour with a hot French boy to celebrate her first showgirl opening (at the famous Lido) and the successful beginning of her life as Magnolia, not Frank. She’d thrown up over the side onto some tourists’ heads far below, and then passed out, and done her very best to ignore and forget the evening ever since.

But her phobia had never been much of a problem since she’d returned to Vegas. There simply weren’t heights, in the flat and desert valley. She had no reason, usually, to go above the second floor. Acrophobia simply hadn’t been an issue.

But if she wanted to face Zem in this place, she’d have to find a way past her fear.

She looked back at the goats, holding still for once and watching her, and had two clear thoughts.

One: I’m never coming up here again. She had a demand for Zem, and this was her one and only chance to voice it.

And two: the Goats will laugh at me forever if I give up now. And they’d tell the story to every other executive in town, how the Mayor had pissed herself and run from the Hall. And Zem would laugh along. She stayed put.

“Okay,” she took a deep breath. “Here we go.”

She stepped over to the first column and laid her hand against it firmly. There– that felt solid, reassuring. She took another step and reached out for the next column, but she couldn’t quite reach it. “Okay, okay,” she told herself, let go and took the biggest step she could. She practically fell against the second column, and she hugged it with all her strength. She felt slightly dizzy, but she felt she’d discovered a system for getting through this. She took a breath, stared down at her feet and the stone pavement, and tried it again.

Another couple steps, another couple columns, and she was making her way down the barbell. The roof of the Spire fell away, sloping underneath her toes while this Hall stretched out into empty air, but as long as she just kept her eyes glued to the square foot she was standing in, she didn’t have to think of that. She distracted herself, as usual, with thoughts of the future. She’d bet every studio in Hollywood would be calling her to beg to shoot here, once this was revealed. Every fashion designer would want to use it for a runway, to show off his new collection.

Magnolia had no intention of cheapening Zem’s Hall by renting it out as a mere location. But imagining those toadying phone calls bought her three more columns’ worth of distance.

“Oh shit, oh shit,” she mumbled. She stared at her hands on the smooth stone. Laid there, pressing firmly, they looked so solid, so reliable. Unfortunately, she could also glimpse views of the tiny city beyond. “Oh shit. Oh shit.”

She knew she was approaching the end, where the pavement flared out again into the smaller loop of the barbell and the roof underneath fell away altogether. At the very end was the dreaded Place, the spot where a wider space gaped between the last two columns, and all of Vegas lay like a particularly avant garde Christmas village miles below. Zem would be ready and waiting there, if he could be believed, to receive petitions.

He’d better be. She had a doozy to lay on him.

She took a breath, waited an extra moment or two for the wind to die down slightly, and literally pushed herself away from the column she was holding into the middle of the Place of Audience. She had no idea where she should look, there was no safe place to fasten her eyes. But as it turned out, that didn’t matter, because she felt so dizzy and so nauseous that she couldn’t focus on anything, anyway. She saw flashes of columns, flashes of the city, flashes of the distant mountains, only visible from here because she was above the smog line.

“Zem,” she cried out. “I’ve come to ask a boon. I’ve earned it, and it’s right that I should have it.” She could feel herself hyperventilating, but if she just concentrated on the words coming out of her mouth, she was sure she would calm down. Communicating was her great gift, when all else failed, she always knew how to talk. She’d built her whole life and all her success on that.

She’d done some studying before she made this climb. Heroic visitors to gods always began by declaring their fitness. Unless they were Christians, at least, in which case they began by groveling. She knew Zem had equal disdain for grovelers and Christians. “I was your first supporter, your first and most fervent servant.” Fervent servant? That hadn’t been in the trial versions she’d slaved over for the last few weeks. She tried to marshal her thoughts, and also to open her eyes. They seemed to have fastened closed on their own, but that was almost worse as she felt herself swaying with the raging wind, and imagined her body pitching, tumbling over the edge, on its way to splattering–

Enough of those thoughts! She cleared her throat and picked up where she’d left off. “I have redesigned this city for you,” she shouted. “I have made its leaders swear loyalty to you. I have served you well, Zem, and I have come up here, to this holy and terrible place you’ve established, to demand my reward. Yes, I said demand! Give me what I crave and I will serve you for as long as you deign to remain among the race of men!” She liked the words “crave” and “deign”. They sounded particularly heroic.

“I have come up here to speak to you about what I am, and what I am to be.”

“Then tell me,” she heard his voice.

Unholy shit! Magnolia ducked, for that voice had sounded huge, produced by a mouth that could swallow the Goodyear blimp in one gulp and want more.

“Uh,” she said.

“What do you want?” Zem’s voice rattled the colonnade. Literally. She felt the pavement shaking and one of the columns across the circle produced a tiny crack. She reached out to steady herself, then resolutely dropped her arm.

“I– I want to ask you–” she began.

She took a deep breath. She allowed her eyes to close again while she collected her wits. When she opened them, she looked at Zem. He was standing in front of her, his heels all but hanging over the drop-off, and waiting with his customary blank expression.

“What do you demand of me?” he asked. And waited to see if she’d repent the word and grovel.

He’d hardly seen her recently. She’d been busy, either bullying the construction crews and hotel bosses, or back in her office shuffling papers and strong-arming the city council. Meanwhile, he’d drifted from hotel suite to hotel suite, killing time while his new city was built.

Zem and Magnolia had never discussed what would become of her after the New Year’s announcement. She’d laid the groundwork for his future admirably. Now the time had come, it seemed, to address hers.

Zem waited.

“You owe me,” she said. “Not only that, but you own me. I can’t return to my old life, I can’t return to any life. You’ve ruined me for human existence. I’m yours now, whether that was your intention or not. And I want you to make it permanent.”

Zem considered. “You want a lifetime appointment?” He looked her over. Magnolia was over fifty, he knew, and from what he understood, humans weren’t useful workers after about seventy or so, modern medicine notwithstanding. So... twenty years? He’d be happy enough to have her for that long, he supposed. By that time he’d just be beginning his real domination of the world. It hardly seemed worth climbing up here and demanding formally.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want a lifetime appointment. I mean, I guess I do. But I want you to fix my lifetime. I want immortality. And no cheap tricks like that guy in the myths who just kept getting older forever. I don’t want to be decrepit. In fact, I want you to make me younger. I want you to make my body the best it’s ever been, make me the best I can be, physically, and make me immortal, and I’ll serve you forever.”

“Hm.”

That was a request worthy of the trek up to this rooftop and all the bells and whistles of formality. Zem turned and looked out over Vegas.

“Let me think about it,” he said, and stepped off the edge.

“No!” Magnolia yelled after him. He’d dissolved his body as he felt it start to fall, so now he turned around in the air to focus on her. He saw in her face not alarm, but outrage. She’d taken a step forward as he’d gone, and now she stood there staring through him, fear of the height washed away by indignation.

“Zem!” she yelled again. Invisibly, he studied her.

She’d not moved to help him, as he appeared to fall. She’d moved in order to demand an answer. She’d not seen him as a man in danger, but as a god who might be cheating her.

He laughed, suddenly, and the air around him shivered as in a rainstorm or a wave of heat. But the atmosphere was dry and at that elevation it was cooled by the same breezes that lifted the birds and planes aloft. Magnolia was still standing and staring.

“All right,” he said gently, and saw her relax.

She looked out toward where he hung, estimating his position pretty well, then nodded once. Then she turned and walked back up the colonnade. She congratulated herself that she only broke into a run at the end, when she was more than halfway up the Hall’s length.

NEXT POST: VENUS DISARMS 'EM (Friday 11/27)

Friday, November 20, 2009

A Clutter of Cats

Rachel and Testy moved into half of a large apartment on West 99th. The other half was possessed by an eighty-year-old ex-Rockette named Belle, and her thirty-seven cats.

“There might not be thirty-seven,” she declared at the top of her lungs from her La-Z-Boy in front of the tv. “I just say that ‘cause it’s got a good ring. That’s the number I stopped counting at. They’ve all got names, and if you can’t remember, just make ‘em up. I call that one U-Turn, ‘cause his mother was Eunice. And those are Fee, Fie, and Foe. Fum’s somewhere else. This orange one is Forty-two. I mean that’s his name, not his age. Cats don’t live that long! I never used to think I would!”

Belle had a tv tray next to her recliner, piled high with takeout menus. She watched news and game shows for hours on end, shouting at Peter Jennings and Pat Sajak with equal enthusiasm. She claimed not to have left the place in ten years, and could recite the phone number for every grocery store and restaurant within a five block radius. “Never liked New York. Moved here when I was seventeen, when Lincoln was still president!” She hooted at them. “Yeah, right! But I never liked this city. Why should I spend my old age wandering around it like all those pathetic has-beens with their wire carts on wheels? I’ve got my retirement, I’ve got a little nest egg. And I’ve got eight rooms with rent control, darlin’s, and two of them can be yours. Five hundred a month, combined, just ‘cause I like you. Now. I’m ordering from Ling’s– what’ll you have? I don’t suggest the Moo Shoo Pork. I don’t think they’d know a pig if it snorted at them. Moo Shoo Rat, more like it!”

“We’ll share a room to sleep in,” Testy told her. “I could use the second one for sewing.”

“Suits me,” Belle shouted, raking her beady eyes over Testy. “What do you sew?”

“Costumes, probably,” the dresser told her.

“Ha! Know something about those, myself! Maybe I can hook you up!”

“Thank you.”

And so they moved in and joined the household. Rachel “put those gorgeous tits to the use God intended,” as Testy said, and got a job serving cocktails. Testy made a name for herself as a skilled seamstress with a talent for beads and rhinestones, but not among the city’s drag queens as she’d expected.

“I guess I’m out of touch, babe,” she told Rachel. “These girls are either all slick like Fifties housewives, with little flip hairdos and polyester skirts, or else they’re tatty and threadbare. I saw one queen in a boa that didn’t even have any feathers left, last night. I wouldn’t want to touch ‘em.” But the opera set, she quickly learned, had taken up where drag queens had left off. They understood her kind of glamour– and they had much more money to pay for it. “I’ve got me a good gig, honey,” Testy confided one week after landing at Belle’s. She’d taken to sewing alongside their landlady, shouting at the television and feeding the cats bits of sushi or eggplant parmigiana. Rachel just sighed and took herself to bed.

“Have you heard anything?” she asked once in awhile. She’d formed the idea that Testy’s mysterious friend moved through a sort of underground network, and word of his arrival would come to them through some code or hint imperceptible to the untrained eye or ear.

“Any day now,” Testy told her.

“Really? Because–”

“Don’t worry. He’ll show up.”

Rachel did her best to stop worrying. She picked cat hair off her clothes, and kept trying.

“Ha!” Belle yelled. “You know what a bunch of cats is called? A clutter! A damn clutter! They said it on Hollywood Squares in June, 1992. And dammit if this place isn’t cluttered with cats! Ha!”

Rachel scratched a fat tom called General Tsao under the chin and smiled. Testy pulled a huge tackle box of threads and needles out of the hidden recesses of the Drag Queen’s trunk and sewed rhinestones.

The magic of New York, such as it was, swept them steadily through the weeks and months, as inexorable and uncaring as a street cleaning machine pushing a pile of old New York Times issues and discarded french fry boxes along the gutters of Upper Broadway.

NEXT POST: AND WHAT I REALLY WANT IS... (Monday 11/23)

Monday, November 16, 2009

Pussy On Parade

Miss Honoré held emergency auditions three weeks after Rachel’s last appearance in Extravaganza!

What she was looking for was merely some bodies. Good bodies, tall bodies, bodies with a minimum ability to count music, she hoped, but mostly bodies, just to fill the stage and give the costumes a place to hang.

What she hoped for, as always, was Pussy Galore reborn.

Vegas showgirls have been called many things, but in Miss Honoré’s mind they were no more nor less than the ultimate Bond Girls. Super feminine and super powerful, willing to melt in any man’s arms who proved himself worthy, but steel-spined bitches to any man who failed. They were what feminism aimed for but missed, what the ancient Amazons tried for but couldn’t conceive, what women were designed to be, as she’d lectured more than one cowering reporter over the years. She sat down in the Extrav! audience twice a year hoping for that girl, that magic, and was invariably disappointed, no matter how much dancing ability or how much beauty she observed. Pussy Galore, Honoré mourned, had passed away once and for all. She collected and stacked the new resumes, and leafed through them as she called this audition to order.

Auditions, under Honoré, followed an invariant pattern. Barring magic, she wanted to see the hopefuls demonstrate they could dance, prove they could listen, and show some small indications of poise and professionalism. She had her own system for testing these attributes, which did not always go over well with the participants in question.

There was nothing resembling ballet in Extravaganza!, but Honoré always began with a short ballet combination, anyway, choreographed and taught by her assistant, Gina. Gina was never much of a presence anywhere– she’d acceded to the assistant company manager position mostly because she’d survived more Extravaganza! contracts than anybody else. In fact, Miss Honoré had been surprised she was still around, when the question of an assistant came up. She hadn’t noticed the girl in years.

Gina usually taught her ballet steps so quietly and unobtrusively that the girls who were supposed to be learning them never noticed her, either. They certainly couldn’t hear her, and generally had no idea she was anyone of importance. The ballet portion of the proceedings tended, therefore, to be chaotic, disorganized, injurious, and marked mainly by dancers stridently demanding to know what was going on and who was in charge. It was also, in consequence, mercifully short. After being treated to three or four raging stampedes of girls rambling across the stage with no rhythm, displaying not the least hint of grace or choreography, Miss Honoré would pick up a mic, yell “Stop, stop!” in tones that had been known to shatter eardrums, and then she would slide out from her seat in the center booth and stomp on stage to take control of things, herself. Gina, in shame, would melt into the shadows of whatever booth was nearest and shuffle some papers.

Miss Honoré would then proceed to tutor the auditioners in something basic, like a showgirl walk. Showgirls in Vegas, as Testy had explained many a time to brand-new ballerinas who had somehow landed on her row (Ellen had been the most recent) do not just schlep from place to place on stage. Neither do they float, as ballerinas are wont to do, or grind their way, as Broadway dancers might. Showgirls swivel, they reach their long legs out like flamingos, they slide along sideways without ever turning their displayed breasts anywhere but straight ahead. Their hips swing and twist and move in half-circles, their legs extend so far they cover more floor with each step than any other woman could in three. They mesmerize and scandalize. The showgirl walk may be the single biggest contribution the state of Nevada has made to sex, legalized prostitution notwithstanding. And that walk, that undulating, sexual, super-feline way of moving, was generally Step Two of an Extrav! audition, tutored and demonstrated by Miss Honoré herself, and leaving, all who beheld her aghast and in awe.

“Wow,” one out-of-town girl told another on this particular occasion, “She’s some old broad– imagine your grandmother doing that?”

“Sh!” her friend told her, staring and struggling vainly to move her hips in anything like the figure-eight inverted swirl of Honoré’s. “If we can’t do this it’s back to L.A. and waiting tables for a buck fifty in tips.”

“I bet they’d tip better if we walked like that,” the first girl commented, and, indeed, they did, when both girls were thrown out five minutes later, along with half the others who’d also failed to meet Honoré’s standards. They drove, dejected, back to Southern California, where they worked on their walking technique and soon had income and table service jobs beyond their wildest dreams. They eventually gave up dancing altogether, and opened the first waitress employment agency, where they made millions teaching other girls The Walk that Honoré had shown them and then reaping a percentage of the take from restaurants all over Southern California.

“Gina’s going to teach you a number, now,” Honoré announced over the mic again, having returned to her booth and resettled herself. The two or three stage hands who were present watched her warily, ready to stuff cotton in their ears. But Honoré’s walking stint always calmed her. “Now, pay attention this time.” And she set down the mic with a heavy clunk and waited while the hapless Gina set about familiarizing the girls with a few eight counts worth of dancing from Extravaganza!

On this memorable occasion, Honoré realized early on, watching the two dozen or so remaining hopefuls stumble through the movements, there was only one girl up there worth looking at. One girl, indeed, caught her attention right away, and held it. That girl wasn’t bothering to watch Gina, or learn the number, or do anything remotely similar to anything the girls around her were doing. Honoré stared at her, and kept staring. She couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t noticed her in the walking. Or even the ballet.

“That’s enough, that’s enough,” she cut Gina off early. “Let’s see what they’ve got. You–” she pointed at the one girl, and riffled without looking down through the pictures and resumes on the table in front of her. “What’s your name?”

“Venus,” the girl said.

Honoré waited. “Venus,” she repeated when a moment had passed. She noticed, out of the corner of her eye, that all the stage hands had stopped in their tasks, far upstage and in the wings and out here in the audience. They were all staring at... Venus, if that really was her name. Honoré was sure she’d seen no resume with anything like that on it.

“Have you ever danced before?” she asked into the mic.

“For years,” the girl answered.

She tossed her hair a bit. She stood center stage and waited. Honoré heard a gulp from her left. One of the sound guys, busy rewiring a speaker till half a minute ago, was nearly falling off the stage.

This “Venus” obviously knew nothing about the business. Her hair was all over the place, she wore no makeup, and she hadn’t even offered any contact information. Honoré had certainly never considered anyone who didn’t know at least those basics. “Let’s see you,” she said, and Venus waited while four other girls, hastily hustled out by Gina, took their places all around her.

Honoré waved a hand, and the music started. And the four girls around Venus danced.

At least, Honoré assumed they danced. They must have– they still wanted the job, they were trained dancers—when music came on, all dancers danced. That was how they were built, how their brains were wired. But in this case, at this particular time, Miss Honoré Jerques never noticed what those four girls did at all. Because Venus, in the middle of them, also moved.

You couldn’t call it dancing. Not exactly. There was nothing discernable as a step. But it was... sensuous, and enticing, and utterly, utterly fascinating. Honoré heard a sudden clatter and assumed that the careless sound man had fallen the four feet to the pit floor. No one made a move to help him. Venus kept on shimmying, or shifting, or whatever she was doing, long after the other girls ran out of choreography. The music ran on until it ended, which, since this was a cut from the show, itself, took about five minutes.

There was silence for another minute. The girls on stage all stared at Venus. Gina forgot to get out of sight. She stood right out in the open where Miss Honoré might yell at her, eyes fixed on Venus, jaw hanging loosely. All the stage hands and waiters who’d come in early to set the room stood still. Miss Honoré caught a flash of dark blue to one side and saw that a pride of executives had wandered in from the hotel offices. They, too, were silent, and moved only to get closer to Venus, creeping slowly down the rows toward the pit where they could worship her more intimately.

“Ahem,” Miss Honoré cleared her throat, and it echoed through the speakers and around the theater. “Very nice. And... Venus–” she’d have to do something about that name, it was ridiculous, “are you available immediately?”

Venus smiled down from on high, and everyone else in the room smiled back, their faces lighting up and lifting to meet her warmth, pouring out from center stage at them.

“I’m here for your pleasure,” she promised, and raised her eyebrows naughtily. She giggled.

Miss Honoré disciplined her lips into a straight line. “Let’s go down to my office,” she said. “I’d like to talk to you.”

She set the mic down on the table and slid out of the booth again. Then she made her way along the row, down the stairs to the pit, through the tables, and up to the stage one more time, while all around her the room stayed silent. The crowd waited, their every breath and every muscle held perfectly still. Venus kept smiling, and looked all around at everyone, meeting, it seemed, each pair of eyes that stared at her, and dimpling back at them. Honoré heard tiny, individual gasps from around the theater, and adjusted her jacket, her skirt as she climbed on stage. “Won’t you come with me?” she asked Venus.

“Of course!” the marvelous girl said, and Honoré knew that Venus was not just happy but thrilled. She was fulfilled to walk– with her, Honoré and only Honoré– down the stairs, through the hallways, to the office. Just them. Just the two of them.

Pussy Galore could eat her heart out.

Honoré nodded at Venus, and Venus shook her hair and fell in with her, and they strolled across the world’s largest stage and disappeared, and all around the room the dozens of dancers, and the dozens more who’d been dismissed but hadn’t left yet, and the stage hands, and the waiters, and the hotel executives who’d come in for a cheap thrill at lunch, and Gina, all stared after them as they went and didn’t say a word or take a breath until they’d gone.

NEXT POST: A CLUTTER OF CATS (Friday 11/20)

Friday, November 13, 2009

When A Drag Queen Speaks...

Seeing the town took two weeks, and at the end of that, Rachel still had no idea why they’d come to New York or how long Testy planned to stay.

“Test,” she broached the subject one afternoon at Rockefeller Center. They were sitting on a bench in the Channel Gardens, staring up at the tops of the buildings, where they’d spied half a dozen people hanging over the edges and staring back at them.

“Bastards,” Testy groused. “Lording it over us that they still have access to those terraces up there. You know they were all supposed to be public, originally? Why, when Rock was building this place, he had plans for each one to represent a different county, with all kinds of imported plants and things. I gave him the idea. It was going to be great.”

She sighed. Rachel watched her.

“Rock? You mean—”

“Never mind, doll. So, what do you want to see next?”

“I don’t know, Testy. Shouldn’t we be… doing something? Finding this friend of yours? Not just wandering around and sightseeing?”

Testy folded her arms. “Honey, we’ve been looking since the moment we got here. I’ve been looking. You didn’t know how to. But there’s been no sign, and I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it’s the wrong month.”

“Wrong… what? You’ve been—Testy, you’re not making sense.”

“Yeah I am, doll. You just don’t have all the information. But don’t worry about that. What say we go apartment shopping, settle down and see what this wormy ol’ Apple has to show us in six months or so. Say, around the holidays. Maybe New Year’s.”

“What? New Year’s? Testy, you didn’t ask me to move here.”

“Well, I kind of did, but you weren’t really ready to hear that part, so I didn’t push it. What are you going to back in Vegas, anyway? Go crawl back to Honorė, who probably won’t even remember your name? Try out for some other show, even older and tattier than Extrav!? Is that really what you want, doll?”

“It’s what I thought I’d be doing a little longer,” Rachel said. “I mean… a little while, anyway.”

“Oh, doll. Come on. Give this a try. For your Auntie Testy. You know you really want to.”

And when a determined drag queen says things like that to an indecisive, aging chorine, there’s little or no chance she’s going to be refused.

“But Testy, really… six months?”

LaLesbiana patted her hand. “We’ll see, darlin’. But it’ll be good. I promise.”

And so that was settled.

NEXT POST: MISS HONORÉ STRIKES GOLD (Monday 11/16)

Monday, November 9, 2009

The Crone

Of course there was a wise old woman. There always is, in every fairy tale. In every story, probably. She’s the fairy godmother, or the hero’s great-aunt, or just the crone who lives next door.

If the hero and/or heroine are somehow so unlucky as to have grown up without a godmother, or great-aunt, and in a crone-less neighborhood, it doesn’t matter. She shows up, anyway, like clockwork, at their isolated cabin in the woods as a storm rages at midnight, just as the baby’s being born, or the crisis is coming, or the good fairy/bad fairy is about to lay a blessing-that-will-be-a-curse, or a curse-that-will-bless, on somebody.

Apparently, these women are simply everywhere, unavoidable, tripping over each other in the streets and desperate to impart their hard-won wisdom. The crone will show up, come hell or high water or logic.

The question that occurs to any halfway intelligent, thoughtful listener is, of course, what is the frail old biddy doing out there in the forest, in the night, in the middle of a raging storm? What is it about deep, dark, untraveled forests that proves such a draw for old, stooped women? Why don’t they just stay home, or at least walk around during daylight hours, when they could see where they were going?

On the other hand, in every story everywhere, they always find shelter and help when they need it, so maybe this is a given, if you are a crone. And, if that is true, then presumably the crones know it, and so they know they don’t have to worry about mundane details like paying attention to where they’re going or being sensible about their travel plans.

It’s curious, really, this crone lore: who are they really? One could mine a lifetime of research, probably, if one were an academic in search of a particularly esoteric Phd., out of the habits and lifestyles of fairy tale crones.

Speaking of which, do you know what those Grimm Brothers were really doing, when they collected and wrote down all their alarming stories? (No need to rehash that old chestnut about how grim the Grimms truly were. Consider that settled.) The Bros. G were researching language, comparing stories and noting how they diverged across the countryside. (Little Red Riding Hood might have been Little Pink Knickers in one town, and Big Red Shawl in another— somehow, they used the differences to diagram an evolution of words and grammar—and thus invented History of Language, causing many English majors much misery for generations.)

In this story, if it’s a real story, then, there has to be a Crone, and there is. Don’t we feel lucky? We’ll meet her now. She’s not a godmother, nor an aunt, nor anybody’s neighbor. She’s not even necessarily old. But she is the requisite wise woman, or the closest approximation we’ll get here. She is called simply The Crone. We’ve typecast her in title and office, because really, why waste time trying to fancy things up?

It was to this woman, large and square and waiting, tapping her foot on a path running along a cliff over a broad, slow river, that Faraway brought Seth when they’d escaped the bloodthirsty virgin and her clamoring warrior clan, when their wounds dripped hot blood (red from the hero, green from the dragon)and they’d both nearly blacked out in the darkness, the insensibility, the sheer confusingness of their flight.

“Oh ho!” she cried, “What happened to you?” And then there was a time of ministering, and inspecting, and poking and prodding, most of which neither Seth nor Faraway much noticed, as they were both just too glad to be on solid earth, and free from pointy Medieval hunters, to care about such minor details.

This may have been the moment, so far, when the two of them were most attuned. Getting away, then getting down, and all the dizziness and blood loss and desperation that went along with those, were their shared experience. They had been blooded, as a partnership. They lay now, on the still ground, while the crone tended to them, and thought of little except the stillness, and the quiet, and the freedom they’d gained from quick death or slow and painful hacking. And each other. When they thought back, or at all, at that moment, each included the other in his thoughts.

—When Faraway’s better..., Seth’s more cogent thoughts began.

—When this hero can stand..., went Faraway’s.

You see they were a team now. Sometimes, barbaric as it may sound, shared peril is the best thing to cement a team, and shared injury is good glue.

“And where have you boys been?” the crone asked. And Seth found, to his minor surprise, that he could answer; that her words pierced his thoughts and came clearly. Moreover, he found that he wanted to answer, that the time for talking, for discussing and understanding, had come.

(You must know that the essence of all stories only comes in the telling. Understanding is born of relating. The meaning, the shape and reasons for our past comes into focus not as it happens, not as we think about it, but through words, as we tell. Any number of things may happen to you, but until you use them in a story, they are only random incidents. It is as you relate your tale, as you string those incidents onto a thread of logic like a rosary, that they take on shape and function. Virginia Woolf said we impress our memories, and she thought doing so was artificial and wrong. The Apostle Paul said we redeem the time, and he thought this was godly and good. But all they both meant was that we make sense of the un-sensical, that which does not have, inherently, a pattern or point. And what would the Apostle Paul and Virginia Woolf think of being cast together as our great and worthy wise ones? They’d be offended, no doubt, and one would rail while the other might laugh. You decide which would do which, and when you tell someone else about it, you’ll have made that story yours.)

“We’ve been to a small planet taken over by a flower, and to, I guess, the Middle Ages, where there was a woman who was hunting a unicorn. That was... pretty disgusting,” he added. “And... we didn’t do much. Mostly, almost as soon as we got there, we had to start trying to escape. The flower wanted to to turn him into mulch and make me protect her, even though she didn’t need it. And the hunters just wanted to kill him, but I think they would have killed me, too, pretty quickly. But we didn’t do anything. I don’t know why we were there.”

He frowned at the dragon then.

“Did you rescue anybody?” the Crone asked. “Set free any prisoners? Right any wrongs?”

“No. Like I said, mostly we just had to get away.”

She nodded. She’d been washing his worst wound, where a rock– or something– had struck him on the shoulder and torn a flap of skin loose. She’d already wrapped up Faraway’s leg. She seemed to have about her no end of linen, bandages, and little bottles of heaven-only-knows-what which she used to dab at them, pour over their cuts, soak their bandages, or demand they drink. So far, Seth had enjoyed one that tasted of vanilla and gagged over one that tasted like burnt cabbage.

“Pretty stupid, then,” she agreed with him. “Terrible waste of time for a stalwart hero like you.”

She went back to her wrapping, not stopping till his entire shoulder was mummified and he couldn’t move it. “That should hold,” she nodded.

“Do you do this much?” he asked.

“What? Oh, almost never. But then, it’s not often that a mythical beast and his hero come swooping down pouring blood and looking bedraggled. I go with what the world hands me, you know?”

Seth nodded vaguely.

“And now let’s get you bedded down so you can rest, and then we’ll see what tomorrow brings. Come this way.”

She waited while Seth hauled himself up, and then they both stood still while Faraway gravely, slowly brought himself to his feet. Then she turned and led them along a sketch of a trail, through trees and thick bushes, and eventually right into the densest, most inaccessible copse in the woods.

She’d disappeared. Seth looked hard at the riotously intertwined foliage to find a way through, and failed.

“Oh, here,” he heard, and a hand reached out and grasped his shirt, pulling him past branches and sharp twigs that caught at him but somehow failed to dig in, and leaves that seemed to magically open... until he found himself standing next to the crone in a clear space, with a hedge of trees and greenery all around, and a palm-sized patch of sky overhead. And Faraway had found his way in, as well, somehow, so that they were all curled into the space together, touching on every side but comfortable, fitted. “And here you’ll be safe until you’re ready to move again, to find your next quest or rampant flower that needs pruning.” And the crone grinned at him, toothy, mocking, yet friendly, and he somehow found himself smiling back, although at the same time shame over his last two adventures burned in his throat and weighed down his mind.

“Thank you,” he mumbled. “Um–”

“Oh, don’t worry. No one will find you. Except me, I’ll come back. But for now you need to sleep, the both of you. Give my salves and potions a chance to do their work. Get you healing. Go on now, find a spot and stay there. Make yourself at home.” Again, she grinned, already backing away into the undergrowth. “I’ll check in on you in the morning.”

And a soft forest floor, it turned out, was a surprisingly comfortable place to sleep, particularly when curled up against a warm dragon, the dark of the copse all around them, and with the tiniest opening into the sky as a nightlight.

When you are a hero, a warm bed is a rare thing. Regular meals are just as rare, and if you are a hero traveling with a dragon, human conversation also falls into this category of strange-and-valuable. Seth had been enjoying long hours of sleep next to Faraway in their copse of trees, and feasting on fruit and meat and fresh green vegetables that the crone brought him, and chatting with her about inconsequential things – the time of year, and whether the nights would stay warm, and the denizens of that area, and who might wander by to discover him. Three days went by like this until Faraway decided to hunt, and took off in a crack of air and a rattle of branches, and the Crone led Seth back up to the cliff-top path where she’d met them, and showed him a likely spot to sit and look down on the river rushing far below.

Rivers are gossipy things, chattering and moving their news along, always eager for what’s coming, what’s next. You can’t trust rivers, but by that same token, you needn’t worry over them too much. They are too flighty, and too hurried, to catch many details, and what they do hear will be broken up, splashed into pieces, before they ever have a chance to repeat it clearly.

“What do you do here?” Seth asked.

The Crone shrugged. “I live.”

“But what does that mean?” the hero asked. “Are you a prisoner in this forest? Were you driven out of some city somewhere, made to live here alone in some hovel somewhere? Is there a king of a prince who has wronged you, sent you to this wilderness?

She glanced at him. “I live here.”

“But–”

She gazed down at the river as it passed, chittering, below. A couple of birds were squabbling over some trash on the far shore, and far upstream there might have been a boat coming into view around a corner. Finally, the Crone sighed, and shrugged, and looked up at Seth.

“I am not a prisoner, or a victim of any kind, hero-boy,” she informed him. “I came here by choice – and how do you know I even live alone, anyway? I do, but that’s beside the point. My home is in a city near here– at its edge, anyway. You’re the one sleeping in a forest. I’ve lived in many places, and I’ll live in many more, before my life is over. I’m happy here, for the moment. But I don’t need rescuing, or avenging, or any other heroic service, thank you very much. That’s not how life works, and you should learn that if you’re going to actually be a hero, and not just some dumb kid running around swinging his sword where he shouldn’t.”

Seth was taken aback, and also a bit angered. He’d only meant to make conversation, and see if perhaps he could offer anything to the Crone. She had fed and cared for him and Faraway, after all. It seemed only right to, well, go out and kill something for her, or something, if she needed that.

“I didn’t–” he began.

“Oh yes, you did. Listen, boy, let me teach you something. You don’t owe me anything for this, it’s just what old, crazy women do in stories– they take care of fallen heroes and patch up raggedy monsters. I’m a supporting character here, got that? But I also get to share some wisdom. Ready? Listen then: life isn’t a story, that you can make up. Oh, it is a story, really, but only after the fact. You don’t get to write it till you’ve lived it, first. Then you can tell it any way you want, and make anything you like out of it. Completely heroic, savior of the world, whatever you want.” She looked at him closely, and saw that she’d lost him. “What I mean is, no one gets to plot out their own path in life. You don’t get a map, and you can’t draw your own. What happens to you, how your adventures turn out – you can’t choose those things. Things happen, and you just have to do the best you can as you face them. So all your worry about being heroic, about doing the heroic thing, at all times and in all places - it’s ridiculous. You can’t know what’s heroic. You won’t find noble quests every place you go, and you probably won’t even recognize them when you do. But if you’re prepared to serve some greater good, if you’re really ready and willing to take on injustice when it shows its face– and you are, I can tell that, so you don’t need to prove it– then you’ll do that when the opportunities arise. And until then, you just have to muddle through like the rest of us. When you’re telling people about your adventures afterward, then you can edit out all the boring parts, the days and weeks you think are un-heroic. You can tell your story however you want– that meeting you had with that killer Rose has the makings for a fine heroic tale, if you ask me. And the story of the bloody virgin, too. That’s a very fine adventure, the revealing of evil lurking under its cover of beauty, the proclaiming of horror where the public sees what’s right and proper. Good stuff,” she nodded vigorously. “You just have to learn to tell it. But this obsession you have for recognizing your own heroism as its happening, or knowing which path in front of you is going to hold the greatest nobility– that’s just stupid. It won’t work. And you’ll drive yourself crazy, and end up doing nothing if you don’t stop.”

“Is this what Faraway told you?” Seth asked her. His voice was stiff, and he was sitting very still, and he said it not because he thought the dragon actually had been talking to her, or would have said any of the things she’d just said, but because he had to argue, had to find a way to oppose what she said, and that was the only objection he could think of.

“No, it wasn’t Faraway. Good God, boy, who do you think I am? I’m here to give you advice, that’s my function in this life, I suppose, and it’s certainly the right I’ve earned, after cleaning your wounds and feeding and keeping you. Hear what I say and do what you will with it– you can cast me as the bad witch or the wicked stepmother or just a senile old biddy, if you ever tell anybody this part. But what I am is a friend, and what you are is going nowhere, when you could go great places, and be great use to a great many people. And I think that’s what you’d like, isn’t it? Am I wrong, boy?”

After a second, Seth shook his stiff head. No, she wasn’t wrong there.

“Good. Then... go. Fly off with Faraway. And see what comes next. Where will he take you, what will you find there? You’ll never know until you go, boy. But you’ll cheat yourself of your greatest story if you go with a pre-planned agenda, always rushing off after the nearest injustice, or the most convenient battle to fight or maiden to free. Sometimes you have to live in a place a little while before you can see where the real injustices lie. You have to get to know people before you can understand who needs your help, and who just wants to use a handy hero. And then,” she finished, looking satisfied, “You won’t find yourself chatting up bloodthirsty virgins who get off at the sight of their barbarian boyfriends slicing off the heads of whatever’s around them.”
“But,” Seth took a deep breath, “But once you get to know people, it’s harder to know if they’re good or bad. It all gets... complicated.” He sighed heavily, his chest heaving as if in a great release.

“Well, yes,” she agreed, tilting her head reflectively. “People are complicated, and their good guy/bad guy status is generally full of shades of gray and very inexact. But still, life’s better when you acknowledge that instead of just bashing ahead and refusing to take time to see it.” She turned her head and looked at him, frowning. The river slowed its rushing to hear. “The problem with a complicated situation isn’t knowing what to do,” she said. “The problem is making yourself do the right thing when you see its consequences. Sticking around to get to know people means you’re going to realize how your actions will affect them. And even when you’re righting wrongs, there’s going to be some fallout. If you save the virgin tied to the stake, you’ve saved her life, but then the dragon she was being sacrificed to is going to be mad, and want something else instead, isn’t he? And if you kill him, well, maybe you’ve murdered a good creature, who deserved to live and never meant to cause all that trouble. Or, even if it was a nasty, horrible dragon, once you kill it all the sheep and goat populations in the area will start to get out of control, and you’ll have created an ecological disaster. Never thought of that one, did you?”

Seth certainly hadn’t.

“I thought,” he began, but then didn’t say anything.

“You thought there was nothing to it, that being all heroic meant glorious battles with cheering crowds, and probably a girl throwing herself at you when you’d finished. Blood and battle and wine, women, and song. Well, it can be all that– but only when you tell the story. And those are really not the most interesting parts of an adventure, anyway. There’s much more interesting stuff to tell before and after the battle, and in the shadows behind the big celebration. Go for the interesting stuff, hero. You’ll find plenty that’s worth your attention.”

Seth sighed again, lifting his shoulders and dropping them, inadvertently dislodging a pebble to go bouncing down the long, steep slope into the river, which hurriedly sped up and rushed on as if it hadn’t been listening in. Seth never noticed.

“What should I do now?” he asked.

The Crone gathered herself up, and stood above him dusting her not-inconsequential body off. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she told him. “You’re the hero – go adventuring! You’ve got a dragon – fly off on him. See what he thinks, where he wants to go. The whole world is open to you, my boy. Go explore it, and come back someday to tell me what you found and what you did there.”
She turned and started to walk away. But, like all Wise Women (or Aunts, or Godmothers, or Crones anywhere, in any story) she stopped when she thought of one last word to share.

“Go gather a story,” she told Seth. And then she walked off.

“I will,” he muttered. And he waited for Faraway to fly back, and then took off with him and flew higher and higher, and winked out in the empty blue of the sky, and went places he’d never imagined, and saw situations he could never have understood.

And so their story was started.

NEXT POST: COME INTO MY PARLOR (Friday 11/13)